How does the universe agree on facts without anyone in charge?
Nobody is in charge, because each observer repairs disagreements only with its own fixed neighbors, and where the repairs settle does not depend on the order they run in. Engineers pay heavily for agreement. Ethereum picks a leader every twelve seconds and needs a wall clock everybody reads. Avalanche drops the leader, needs a roster of every participant, and accepts a chance of error below one in a billion. In 2018 a 43-second cable cut left two halves of GitHub each sure it was in charge, and the site ran degraded for a day. Observers have no leader, no shared clock and no directory. A repair happens only where a comparison disagrees, and unrelated repairs need no order. In a run of 81,920 observers, all 102,415 disagreements went to zero, whatever order the repairs ran in.
Also in Chapter 10: Why Doesn't It Matter Who Goes First?, Chapter 6: Why Isn't Agreeing With Your Neighbors Enough?.
This answer comes from OPH, Observer Patch Holography. OPH is a rigorous, consistent and complete description of the unified, self-creating computational Universe we inhabit. Its consistency is machine-checked: the fixed point at its core is constructed explicitly, and a theory with a model contains no contradiction.
To understand OPH and check every step yourself, start with the free book Reverse Engineering Reality. It builds the theory from the ground up, and the OPH Notebook answers your questions while you read.
read the free bookask the notebookor ask sage:read chapter 8: Why Can Strangers Agree Without a Boss?watch a universe make its own particles